


Death Drive

by x_los



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Death, Dubious Morality, M/M, Moral Dilemmas, Morally Ambiguous Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-09-30 17:23:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20450795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: The Master always has a plan, and so it should hardly be surprising that all his projects have tended towards a single grand design. Unfortunately it isn't one his former partner can understand or approve of, and it hasn't been going particularly well, either.





	Death Drive

**Author's Note:**

> This was written 11 years ago for the Best Enemies Anon Meme prompt, "Death, dying, underworld or afterlife."  
http://community.livejournal.com/best_enemies/13938.html?thread=251506#t251506
> 
> I've edited it lightly, but largely kept it as-was.

Life was suffering. That much was a simple truism. Even the light that hit your eyes and enabled you see colors slowly burned your retinas as it did so—a minor inconvenience, when compared to the fact that all beings existed in a constant state of physical decay. The process of living was the process of losing things, and the more alive a creature became, the deeper its losses grew. First a child was ripped from what warmth and comfort unity with its mother could offer. Then that child grew to become an adult, with all the dangerous attachments attendant on that state. 

Gallifrey’s material prosperity had somewhat masked the ancient aches: hunger, disease, and all the other grotesqueries flesh was prone to. But it couldn’t transmute the  _ substance _ of suffering. It seeped out in death, which the Time Lords battled but could never fully vanquish. Minds that lived millenia still decayed, falling into madness. An eye-blink, in the time scale of the stars, was too much contact with this universe for any living creature to endure. Pain leaked through the cracks of progress. It was the stupid, purposeless loss of a child, a mate, or a friend—agony that clawed through the meat of you. Entropy reigned triumphant: glutted, gloating, inescapable.

The Master had always intended to bring order and reason to the galaxy.

***

The Master had been twelve when his mother died. He had not even been the Master, yet. 

Theta’s mother had been the one to tell him. At his own mother’s discretion, he’d never had any father to fill the office. Koschei had been  Avdroshketyananka ’s only child: the pride of her rich life. Improbably, Verity had become her dearest friend. And so this had fallen to her.

Theta’s mother’s blue eyes had held his. They were Theta’s eyes, and this was the first time Koschei had noticed it. Verity’s thin, weak human hands had clutched at his face. She’d swallowed.

“Koschei,” she started. She stopped. She began again. “My darling, your mother. Your mother is dead. I’m sorry. Lord, I’m so sorry.”

Koschei had nodded solemnly, and asked when she was expected to wake. He asked when he could see her. Naturally he assumed the lab accident had cost her a regeneration. It meant the loss of the mother he’d known, and it was of course deeply sad, but not—

And oh, how Verity’s mouth had trembled. Later, he imagined the human had been as much affected by amusement at his childish idiocy as by her effort not to cry.

“No. No, love. Not like that—”

To a being as close to death as Verity was, Koschei supposed his species’ biological power must have made him seem weak and ridiculous. A figure looking down from such a great height must seem so small, to the people on the ground. He must have seemed a simpleton, not to have understood that his mother was dead, truly dead, properly  _ dead _ . Her busy hands were still. Her smirking mouth had burned away in the chemical fire, exposing her skull and teeth to everyone. This seemed, to her young son, a greater violation than strangers gaping at her nakedness. 

There were people who talked about Verity like she was an animal, like she was furniture. Koschei had always known they were wrong, but now he saw the comic pathos of the Time Lord’s supposed superiority. Verity understood death, better than any of them. Koschei struggled to comprehend the bare fact of what had happened and what it meant. But even a human could grasp that she who had known so much knew nothing, now. That  Avdroshketyananka’s knowledge had been rendered worthless and meaningless, as if it had never been.

***

When they were teenagers, Theta was briefly interested in religious philosophy. (Theta was briefly interested in everything.) According to something he’d read, Bodhisattvas achieved Enlightenment—the right not to be, which the Matrix would never allow even a dead Time Lord. Yet Bodhisattvas were so filled with compassion for the living that they chose to remain, to continue to endure in the agony of existence, in order to deliver others from it.

Theta said it as they sat idly on the grass. His head rested on Koschei’s stomach, and his blond curls drifted over the collar of his black school jacket. At the time, Koschei found such general compassion unfathomable. The only person he loved enough to live for was Theta.

***

Their love was blessedly sterile. Both men, they could never accidentally sentence some unconsenting soul to birth. That comforted Koschei. Occasionally, Theta would whisper temptation. ‘A child with your face and my eyes, with your strength and my silliness, it’d be  _ grand _ , wouldn’t it Koschei?’

A part of him did want that. That same wretched part held him back from telling Theta exactly why (though he could see the child in his mind’s eye, just as if it were born) he could never consent to such a thing. ‘Later,’ he would tell Theta, until Theta grew sick of the sound of it, because he was afraid to deny his lover outright. ‘Later, when we’re older.’ But Theta could never stand waiting, and Theta could never tolerate being told no.

Koschei told himself it didn’t break his hearts when Theta did have a child--but not one of Koschei’s making. So strong was Theta’s desire for life, so dumb was Theta to the reality of what he wanted, that he loomed himself a son from his own genetic material and loved the boy completely. Theta had gone back to rear the boy in his father’s chapter house, and sent him off to the Academy in due course. It was quite usual, and Koschei was shocked to find Theta enjoying doing anything anyone expected of him.

Theta had never been so steady, so settled, so  _ whole _ in his life as he was in that short span of years: when he believed he’d made something, some _ one _ , that would outlast him. When the child perished in the first Time War, Koschei could only silently rock Theta, back and forth, as his lover sobbed and screamed through the inevitable fall. 

***

Theta didn’t understand. Over the cooling body of his first victim, the Master at last explained his reasoning in the perfect clarity of its logic and the lovely rhetoric he’d been composing in his head for centuries, just for Theta’s benefit. 

“I can’t do this alone,” the Master finished. “It’s too great a task.” He gestured frantically at the universe around them. “There’s so much  _ life _ , and we have to ease it all to rest.” His great work was kind. Decent. Merciful. Just. It was everything Theta valued, everything  _ they wanted _ .

“A doctor,” the Master said, pressing a red-slick hand to Theta’s face, “is an agent of evil. He delays the inevitable. He draws out the pain. He is cruelty itself.”

“I’ll be a Doctor then,” Theta said, his eyes narrowing. His lip shook like his mother’s had, that awful day. “Koschei, you’re  _ insane _ .”

“Far from it. Theta please,” the Master begged. “Don’t leave me. Surely  _ you  _ understand!”

But Theta had looked at him with horror, with revulsion, and the Master was left to face the task with no assistance from anyone. 

He accepted that, in time. This burden was a part of the responsibility he’d assumed. He simply wished it didn’t hurt so much. He’d crafted a persuasive argument, but he’d somehow never really expected to need it. He hadn’t been able to imagine or predict his lover’s total disagreement anymore than he’d been able to imagine or anticipate his mother’s death. Theta’s disgust was something he’d never expected to countenance, and he had no defense against it.

***

The Master dressed as though he were in mourning. The funerary trappings seemed a fair announcement to the world of his aims and intent, even as priests wore their vestments and soldiers their uniforms.

Over the centuries several opportunities arose to torture the Doctor. The Master took them all. It pained him to do so, but he grinned through the screams, rictus-faced, because it was necessary to show the Doctor the true nature of what he was so desperate to preserve. He’d staged some of his plans before the Doctor’s very eyes in a desperate effort to illustrate what exactly he was attempting, to make the Doctor understand. It never worked, but the Master needed to be able to tell himself he’d tried. And he couldn’t help but hope. The Doctor was too brilliant to remain willfully blind forever.

***

He tried to give the Doctor death on numerous occasions, and each time he proved unequal to the task the Master was haunted by immeasurable regret.

***

He wished, after failing to destroy Gallifrey and his Doctor, to die. His death felt so near, and so close. He could see it moving around him like a great animal, circling. He could smell it in the sweet rot of his own flesh.

The Master would like to have believed that he clung to his existence out of compassion for all life, but knew himself better than that. His motives were nearer. More selfish. The Doctor lived, and if the Master died the Doctor might go on doing so for millennia, driven by his uncomprehending, stupid desire to patch things together, to sustain that which craved destruction. How  _ could _ the Master die before the one person he allowed himself to love? How could he leave Theta, alone, to suffer the world?

The Master lowered himself to clinging to life, just for that. He endured the physical decay that so disgusted him, that was far more his nemesis than the Doctor could ever be. In his agony and confusion, he allowed himself the indulgence of his most cherished fantasies. He played them over and over in his mind, like a child ceaselessly demanding his favorite bedtime story. There would be such soft joy in the Doctor’s dimming eyes as he finally let go, as life finally slipped away from him. The Master owed him that.

***

The Doctor told him that if Logopolis were destroyed, it would take a third of the universe with it. The Master refused to believe him. It was too perfect. Too complete. When he pushed through anyway, expecting nothing, really, and crumpled star systems with his hands like bits of paper, the Master laughed with pure, childlike joy.

The Master rushed to seize control of the process, to hasten its conclusion. It took the Master some time to truly forgive the Doctor for ruining that one amazing cataclysm, but the Master supposed it had never been meant to be. He didn’t believe in any universal will that turned against the tendency to suffering and embraced his own design, but nevertheless the Master occasionally entertained a whimsical idea of fate. And the Doctor had never been so beautiful to him as when he fell. 

***

The Master couldn’t bring himself to kill the Doctor in Castrovalva. Furious with himself, the Master nonetheless wondered why he was even surprised. He’d had every opportunity, and never,  _ never _ managed. His stupid fondness, his worldly, pathetic adoration—they kept his plans and his vision from reaching their obvious, natural conclusion.

The Doctor had been spread beneath him, borne to him in a coffin, sleeping as if already dead—and the Master had still needed to see him, one final time. Theta always made him want to kiss and touch and fuck, to make futile gestures towards a life together, as if he didn’t know better. The love of his life, and the Master could only offer him such clumsy insults. Death would have been a far more fitting show of his deep respect. Of the tender regard he held the Doctor in.

***

The first time he’d tried to kill Theta, they had been in bed. Theta’s child had burned (even as Koschei’s own mother had—twinned in their pain, why couldn’t Theta understand?), and Theta had been a wounded, wretched mass of thwarted love and deep need. It had hurt to see him like that, and so Koschei had wrapped his hands around Theta’s beautifully frail neck. Koschei had always envied him that. Theta was favored by nature, and more perfect by design. His body was so much closer to death, simply by virtue of his half-human heritage and the weaknesses incumbent on that birthright. Koschei had held the column containing Theta’s breath, his soul, and  _ pressed _ , even as he fucked Theta thoroughly, even as Theta tried to say something through his closing windpipe.

“Shh,” Koschei had soothed him, kissing Theta’s trembling lips, “Let me take care of you.” Theta had thrashed beneath him, and sexuality and mortality twisted in Koschei’s mind, twining into one fine thread. Theta’s muscles had spasmed. 

“I love you,” Koschei had whispered, becoming aware that he was crying. “I love you so much.” 

But Theta had come and passed out, and Koschei hadn’t been able to bring himself to finish it. He was too weak, and too selfish. He was too enamored of Theta’s life to be its end. No matter that he knew that _he_ should be the one to do it. No matter how much he wanted to give the Doctor that highest gift, the only one that truly counted for anything.

Theta had worn a high collar over his bruises in the morning, and had avoided looking at him. They had never again spoken of that night.

***

The Daleks only conquered to breed and expand their teeming armies, and their campaign of slaughter offered no absolution the Master could make use of. The end of the universe, in contrast, was comforting and beautiful, and the perfect place to hide. The Master brought the Toclafane back in time to hasten that glorious inevitability. Millions of years of life lay suffering between primitive Earth and the end of all things. How could he look upon that infinite agony unmoved?

In a year of having the Doctor at his side (ancient and close to the end, and  _ god _ if it didn’t make the Master want him more), the Master yet again proved unequal to the only task that mattered to him. The Doctor lived, and that was failure so enduring, so total, that even biting out a declaration of victory when the Doctor begged him to stay, as much as admitting his love for him, couldn’t truly allay the pain. Over the last centuries the Doctor had avoided saying anything of the kind. The Master couldn’t lie to himself and claim those evasions hadn’t ached, that the Doctor’s tears for him now weren’t sweet.

Of course the Master had a contingency plan. He work was still unfinished. The great, wide universe still needed him, and his beloved, mistaken Doctor more than anything else in it. And one day, he would be strong enough to set both of them free. He  _ would  _ bring order to the wretched, chaotic universe, if it took him ten thousand years of living in it: he would bring silence, death and peace.

  
  



End file.
